Athletes Archive

Adonal Foyle is my neighbor. I’ve never talked to him about basketball before, even though I’m a die-hard Magic fan. Instead, we’ve had brief conversations about writing and literature and his non-profit back in the Caribbean, the Kerosene Lamp Foundation. This, of course, was back when I was finishing up my book and he was writing his thesis. We’d run into each other at the same WiFi spots and eating places in Thornton Park.

Have you ever looked around your workplace or classroom and thought, “Who are these people? And how do I fit in here?” One of the finest things to come from my Rollins College experience is exactly this: I was forced to surround myself with people I may not have associated with normally. That’s how I met the infamous Reverend Ben Cox—we have sat next to each other in class for the past four years.

In May, Ben and I will both graduate from Rollins with a Masters Degree in Liberal Studies. Other than this commonality, we might as well be from different planets.

“I’d like to do something nice for someone else,” I told my friend Shelby. We were on the way to school, and she had asked me what I was going to do for my 10-year anniversary of living with a spinal cord injury. November 16 was approaching quickly, and I was obsessing about it. “What would you do?” she asked. […]

When The Standerd asked me to do a creative interview with Harley, I wasn’t sure what angle to go about doing it. At that particular time, we were close—too close; Harley was living in my house with Sam Thomson, a fellow Aussie wakeboarder and refugee for the summer. So for the magazine part of the interview, I designed a pie chart of Harley’s weekly activities and tagged it with some other rider’s quotes, hoping to showcase his eagerness and dedication to wakeboarding, among other things like playing Rock Band and finding candy.

If you ask me, Dallas Friday needs no introduction. Chances are you have seen her on TV, either on ESPN, FUSE, or the ABC Family channel, in a show called Switch; or you may watched her Cheetos commercial or recognized her voice and reproduced image on the Disney cartoon Kim Possible.
If you don’t watch TV, you have seen her in a magazine or the newspaper. After all, she’s been featured in over ten different titles, including major publications like Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal, Sports Illustrated, CosmoGIRL! and Southern Living. The 21-year-old also made headlines in the local newspaper two years ago, when she fractured her femur during a wakeboard contest in Singapore. It wasn’t just the news of her injury that broke headlines, but the fact that she was induced into a medical coma from post-surgery complications. Her near fatal experience had editors eager to follow her story until she was well and back into the states.
And finally, like other celebrity atheletes, Dallas owns a fair bit of internet real estate. The rider can be found on Facebook, MySpace, www.DallasFriday.com and searched through engines like Wikipedia, Google, You Tube, etc… To escape Dallas Friday and her media frenzy seems nearly impossible—at least to me. That’s why I’m not even going to bother conjuring up an intro for the world class athlete. Instead, I’d rather focus on the unique dynamics of this interview.
The following interview was created specifically to coordinate with the article I wrote about Dallas for the 2.2 issue of The Standerd: Wakeboard Quarterly. To go along with the edit, photographer Josh Letchworth took photos of our interview in hopes to capture the event in its rawest form. I knew having another person in the room was bound to effect the normal dynamics of my interviewing process, but no one could have predicted Josh’s influence on the two of us. As he jumps in and starts to ask questions, you will notice Dallas starts really opening up; I also stop talking and start admiring his candidness. So instead of the interview ending, which is what I thought was happening, it begins again; and the result is amazing. Josh exposes a deeper, sincere Dallas, perhaps this is a side of her that you haven’t heard about.